UAE’s G42 teams up with Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India

Abu Dhabi-based tech company G42 has partnered with U.S. chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power through a new supercomputer in India, the companies said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The new system will be hosted inside India and will comply with local data residency, security, and regulatory requirements. The initiative is intended to make large-scale computing available for AI use cases across universities and other educational bodies, government organisations, and small and medium enterprises.

“Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness. This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security,” Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, said in a statement.

Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also participating in the effort. Last year, MBZUAI and G42 released Nanda 87B, a Hindi-English large language model built on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model, which the organisations said is designed to understand casual speech in both Hindi and English.

“Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs,” said Andy Hock, chief strategy officer at Cerebras.

The India AI Impact Summit this week included several announcements around AI infrastructure from both Indian conglomerates and overseas companies.

Indian group Adani pledged $100 billion to build up to 5 gigawatts of data centre capacity in India by 2035. Reliance also said it would invest $110 billion over the next seven years to develop gigawatt-scale data centres.

OpenAI has partnered with the Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI compute capacity in the country under its Stargate project, with plans to eventually scale to 1 gigawatt. India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said during the summit that India aims to attract more than $200 billion in infrastructure investment over the next two years through a combination of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and supportive policy measures.

So far, U.S. technology giants — including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — have already committed roughly $70 billion to expand AI and cloud infrastructure across India.